John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

In case you missed the last day of HIMSS 2016 (which is most of you since the keynote area was pretty empty), you missed a number of interesting keynote sessions and other education sessions. However, as I thought through the sessions that day, this comment from a patient attending one of those sessions really stood out to me:

Based on the reaction of the crowd to this comment and my own experience talking with thousands of doctors and patients, this is a very common problem. Meaningful use encouraged providers to have a patient portal, but this had the unintended side effect of what I’d call portal proliferation.

The patient who commented about her “hyperportalotus” said that she knew that she had portals for most of her providers, but she couldn’t keep track of which provider was on which portal. No doubt she was embarrassed when she couldn’t remember how to log in to that many portals as well. Plus, the last thing any sick person wants to do is go searching through 9 portals to find the one that has the information they need.

What concerns me most about Hyperportalotus is that I don’t think there’s a clear pathway to treating this debilitating problem. There are some treatments that make it better, but the problem still remains and I don’t see a cure for the problem coming anytime soon. Is the government going to come out with a portal non-proliferation treaty? I don’t think so.

Before I get a wave of pitches that you’ve solved this problem, I’ll make it clear that I don’t think the patient being an HIE of one is a scalable solution. That idea might work for some patients, but it won’t work for most. Plus, the complexity of each portal having their own format and design causes so many issues with the concept of the patient being the repository and aggregator of their health information.

I’d love to hear how people think this will play out? We got a bunch of doctors on the portal. Now what?